Hellraisers (6 page)

Marlow had taken half a dozen steps into the garage when he heard a crunch behind him. He swung around to see something that had to be an illusion caused by the heat, that couldn't be real.

The armored truck that stood at the end of the ramp was coming to life.

Literally
coming to life. Something was pulling itself out of the vehicle, a shape made up of the wide grille and the license plate. One of the tires exploded, a shard of lightning slicing up from the floor into the ceiling hard enough to knock loose chunks of concrete. Still that shape came, looking like a bear, its legs made of long strips of metal, its huge, bulky body half engine, half chassis, its face a twisted knot of license plate, the Ford medallion where one eye might have been.

It's not real, it's a trick of the light, it's something poisonous in the smoke, it's …

The creature slipped free, crunching to the ground, shaking itself like a wet dog and spraying sparks across the garage. Then it started to run on all fours, its clumsy feet slipping, claws churning up concrete like the floor was made of butter. Marlow had swung the gun up before he even knew what he was doing, wrenching at the triggers, both of them, as the creature loomed up before him.

Nothing happened.

The creature slammed into him as hard and fast as a truck. He was thrown back, spinning, landing hard enough to knock away the last scraps of oxygen. He rolled onto his back, seeing the lumbering metal shape canter away into the smoke, heading for a pillar, toward a silhouette there. And surely that had to be another hallucination, because even though Marlow had no air left to give, the girl he saw there still managed to take his breath away. She was beautiful, despite the blood and bruises on her face. It was a hard kind of beauty, her brow folded into a frown, her lips a thin, grim line, her eyes chips of flint, utterly focused, like she was ready to head-butt her way through a stone wall and not give a damn about the consequences. And as for her body …

Are you serious? Focus!

He shook his head. The girl was carrying an old-fashioned wooden weapon—a
crossbow
?—but she was obviously hurt bad because she was struggling to lift it. A bone jutted from a broken leg. The guy with the shotgun was advancing, firing shot after shot, but the truck-thing was relentless, crunching forward, heading right for the girl. It reached out for her with a long, metal limb, curling it around her chest, lifting her up. She screamed, the crossbow falling from her hand.

Marlow pushed himself to his feet, ignoring the pain as he searched the floor for his gun. By the time he'd picked it up the creature had raised another limb, this one tipped with a wicked shard of steel. He still didn't know who the good guys were, but out of a guy and a girl and a monster he figured the odds had to be on his side. He sprinted toward them, this time remembering to slide off the safety catch. He reached the girl at the same time as the man in black. The guy flicked him a glance—his face half scar and half grimace—then he lifted his weapon and fired.

They were ten feet away from the creature, and the blast from the man's shotgun was so fierce that it made its metal flesh ripple. Marlow gritted his teeth, pulled both triggers on his own gun. It barked, bucking hard enough to rip itself free of his fingers. A bolt of pain licked up his shoulder into his neck, making him cry out. The creature didn't react, bringing its limb back like a scorpion tail, the girl hanging before it, kicking pathetically.

“Pan!” the man cried, pumping the mag, firing again. He threw the weapon aside and leaped, grabbing the creature around the neck, trying to wrench it away. Maybe two hundred pounds of flesh against half a ton of metal. It didn't end well, the creature lashing out with another of its metal limbs and sending him spinning away. He slid across the floor, groaning wetly, lying still.

Marlow scrabbled for his gun, working shells from his pocket, dropping them, panicking, unable to breathe, the air too thick. The darkness that was creeping into his vision had nothing to do with the smoke.

“Go on then,” he heard the girl say, her words choked with anger. “Do your worst.”

A scream, maybe human, maybe not, so full of violent glee that Marlow fell on his ass. He looked up, saw the creature's limb flick back, then dart forward. It punched through the very center of the girl's chest, right through her heart, appearing from her back in an eruption of blood and bone.

Her face knotted up in agony and defiance, her teeth gritted, like she was trying to hold back death with sheer force of will. Then everything went slack, her legs dangling, her arms slapping against her sides, her face falling, like meat sliding off the bone. Her eyes were the last, flicking away from the creature, finding Marlow, holding him for an instant that could have been an eternity. He couldn't move, couldn't have drawn a breath even if he had been physically able to. He just sat there on the warm concrete, the heat of the fire on his skin, until the last trickle of life drained away and her gaze moved off toward some different horizon, some place that only the dead could see.

No.

There was still time to save her. He grabbed the gun, snapping it open and ejecting the used shells. The creature slid its limb free from the girl, flicking it hard enough to spray blood into the fire, sending jets of pink steam into the air. Marlow jammed shells into the barrels, cranked the gun shut, walked right up behind it, and pulled one trigger. This time he kept a solid hold, bracing the stock against his shoulder, shifting his weight against the recoil. The force of the explosion shattered the back of the creature's head, scattering lethal shrapnel. It dropped the girl, turning. Marlow didn't wait, just pulled the second trigger, ripping another chunk of metal away from the creature's body.

It staggered, weakening, its metal limbs squealing as it flailed. Marlow retreated, reloading, each attempt at a breath like he was trying to lift a dead weight off his chest. He clawed them in, his wheezes even louder than the roar of the fire, even louder than the crunch of the beast's feet as it advanced. He shunted two more shells into the holes, held his ground until the creature was close enough to touch. Then he pulled both triggers, blowing a hole right through the center of the thing. It stood still for a moment, as if trying to figure out what was wrong, before collapsing.

Marlow reached for his pockets, the world suddenly spinning, not enough oxygen. He reeled, glancing off a pillar, dropping like a ton weight. And it hit him, just as hard, the knowledge that he was going to die in here. He tried to breathe, his windpipe no wider than a hair, refusing to let anything in or out. Kicking at the ground, grasping at his pockets, finding his inhaler and bringing it to his lips. Where was the damn end of it?

Something loomed up in front of him, the truck beast with its ragged wound of cables and splinters. There was another shape to the side, Marlow's vision so blurred that he could almost convince himself that what he saw there wasn't a living creature made of concrete, its mouth a jagged, saw-toothed scar across its body, big enough to swallow him whole. They closed in, smelling his fear, his blood.

He sucked on the inhaler, pressing randomly, nothing. Lifting it, he saw that it was a shotgun shell, and his heart seemed to give up alongside his lungs. He wheezed, not even enough air for a cough, his hand slapping down to the floor. At least the asthma would get him first. Better to suffocate than to be torn to pieces by … by whatever the hell those things were.

They prowled toward him, almost lazily, their eyeless faces somehow burning right into the very core of his soul. Close enough now that he could see the way the metal bent like plastic when they moved, concrete as malleable as Play-Doh but still hard enough to crush his bones to powder. The rock-like one reared up, that vast maw opening.

“Thought you'd finished with me, did you?” said a voice.

There was a soft twang and a metal bolt plowed into the neck stump of the truck beast. There was a blazing wave of light and a booming explosion, like a concussion grenade, and the creature was reduced to a mound of rubble. What stood behind it was surely impossible. The girl's chest was caved in, firelight visible through the gaping hole where her heart should have been. Even now, though, the wound seemed to be closing, flesh knitting back together. The ugly tears on her arms and neck and face were sealing, too, as if time were going backward, white smoke drifting up from her skin. She was gritting her teeth against it, the pain etched into every line of her face, every jutting tendon in her neck.

The concrete creature saw her and uttered a noise that could have been a building collapsing, a feral, industrial roar. It bounded past, running right for her. And over the thunder of its feet he heard the girl say, “I'm whole. End the contract.”

The beast pounced, so heavy that Marlow felt the tremor as it left the ground. The girl just stood there, empty crossbow by her side, those dark eyes never blinking. Then, like it had hit some kind of invisible wall, the creature dropped, landing with a crunch, exploding into dust. It twitched once, then lay still. The truck thing simply froze. There was another metallic bang from the other side of the garage, Marlow squinting to see a figure formed from a fire door and a section of wall fall over like a felled tree. Then there was silence, other than the subdued whisper of the flames and Marlow's desperate, choking breaths.

He almost had time to feel relieved before he remembered he was still dying.

He clutched at his throat with one hand, slapping his empty pockets with the other, his back arching. The girl scanned the lot, a look of bored contempt on her perfect face. Only then did she look at Marlow, not a trace of gratitude or kindness in those perfect features. Her injuries had stopped healing, some of the nicks and scrapes still dripping blood. But there was no sign of the puncture wound in her chest other than a thick, leathery scar. Her uniform, though, had been unable to repair itself. It flapped open, revealing a black bra underneath.

Not such a bad way to go,
his brain told him, and for once in his life he had to agree.

The girl noticed where he was looking, but made no effort to cover up, just opened her mouth and spoke.

“Done?”

Marlow couldn't have answered even if he'd known what she was asking. His lungs were completely empty. There may as well have been a tank parked on top of him. He tried to shape his mouth around the word
inhaler
, tried to jab a finger at his throat, screaming inside his head,
Please, find it for me, get help.

“You cut that one too close, Ostheim,” she said, and he realized she was talking to somebody else. “We lost Forrest, and Herc.”

“Not quite,” said another voice. Marlow saw the man he'd been fighting alongside earlier, walking over, barely an inch of skin not drenched in blood and smeared with filth. He stood stooped next to the girl, panting, but she didn't even acknowledge his presence. They both looked at Marlow.

“None,” the girl said in answer to some unheard question. “No other survivors.”

The man glanced at her.

“What about him?”

“What about him?” she replied, her voice the coldest thing Marlow had ever heard.

“Saved your life.”

“No, he didn't. The contract did. Remember the rules, Herc. Nobody knows.”

Marlow could no longer hold his eyes open and he fell into darkness. He could almost hear his lungs screaming, the loudest thing in the world. Squirming on the floor. It was a coward's way out.

“Hellraisers don't grow on trees,” he heard the man say. “We need more Engineers. He can fight.”

“Look at him. He can't even breathe.”

“Pan.”

Marlow made out the scuffing of feet, the sound of somebody walking away.

“Pan!”

And that was it. One last squeaking, pathetic, airless breath. Marlow wished his last thought could have been of his mom, of his brother, of the things he loved. Instead, the very last bubble of oxygen he would ever breathe was expended wishing he could tell a girl whose life he had just saved to go screw herself.

 

ICE QUEEN

“Pan!”

She turned away, partly so she could scan for an exit, partly so Herc wouldn't see her face. It was taking every ounce of strength she had to stay upright, her body a broken engine on the verge of stalling. Everything hurt.
Everything.
Especially her chest. Although
hurt
was the wrong word. It wasn't pain so much as a grinding, awful sense that this time she'd gone too far. Her heart pulsed weak and wet and the vertebrae in her spine scraped together. There was a trapped nerve in there, and it felt like somebody jabbing her repeatedly with a scalpel. She wasn't taking in enough air because one of her lungs hadn't fully reinflated. Her contract had worked, but only barely. A few more seconds, maybe, and they'd have had her.

The underground parking lot was hell on earth, literally. The scattered remains of the demons lay beside the corpse of the driver, identical only in the absence of life. The truth was he didn't know how lucky he was, to be dead, to be cold. There were far worse places the living could go when their hearts stopped beating and their bodies started cooling. She'd almost found out exactly how bad those places were.

No time for that. No time for what-ifs. There would be a SWAT team down here soon, and she didn't want to be around when they started firing bullets or questions at her. She couldn't take the exit ramp, the whole world would be watching by now. But there was an access door in the far wall. Half a door, anyway, with a demon-shaped hole in one side where something had pulled loose. It hung off its hinges, swinging in the currents of heat that circled the parking lot, beckoning her like a finger.

“… zztt … oing?”

The earpiece was history and she plucked it out, chucking it. She walked toward the door, going as fast as the wreck of her body would let her. The molten heat of the adrenaline was cooling into solid metal in her limbs, weighing her down, the reality of the situation bleeding back in. Had she died back there? She rubbed the scar on her chest, the mottled skin completely numb. The thought frightened her. It
terrified
her. Because for an instant, when the demon's blade cut through her heart, she'd felt the world dissolve, felt something take hold of her soul, wrench her down through the fabric of reality into whatever waited for her below. Only an instant, then the contract had kicked in. But it had been close.